Follow Me

Data Protection

Seán’s CD Freaks Reviews (on MyCE)

My final and most recent review for MyCE is of the Transcend JetFlash 620 64GB pen drive, published 16th March 2011. This is an unusually high capacity pen drive for its small size and also includes 256-bit encryption. In this review, I check it how it performs with its factory formatted FAT32 file system and how FAT32 compares with exFAT and NTFS on the pen drive.

Eminent 2.5″ eSATA/USB & 3.5″ USB HDD enclosures, published 7th March 2011. Despite how cheap external hard drives have become, many people still prefer building their own external hard drive, as the main advantage here is that the person knows exactly what hard disk is going inside the case. So in this review, I check out two hard disk enclosures Eminent gave me a lend of for review, to see how they perform with a hard disk as well as with an SSD to test their limits. Both enclosures have a USB 2.0 interface and the 2.5″ enclosure also includes eSATA.

My most recent review is of the Transcend’s latest 32GB & 256GB SSDs, published 19th February 2011. These SSDs feature the new JMicron 616(+S) controller, so in this review, I re-run many of the benchmarks to get a direct comparison with the earlier SSDs and to find out what has improved with the new controller.

One thing new I did for this SSD review is include real-world SSD comparison graphs. This makes comparison much easier than looking at large tables of figures. The following is an example of one of the tables, showing the time it takes to launch applications while an archive is being extracted to the SSD in the background. The 500GB drive here is a 3.5″ 7200RPM hard disk and the JM612 SSD is the earlier Transcend 256GB SSD:

Samsung S2 Portable 3 1TB USB3 2.5″ HDD, published 4th February 2011 – If you are one who has bought a high end SSD equipped laptop with USB3 and find the SSD capacity too restrictive, a fast external hard disk is probably going to be your next purchase. So in this review, I check out the performance of this portable 1TB HDD in both USB2 and USB3 modes as well as in both FAT32 and NTFS. While it may sound daft trying out two different file systems, in the real world, NTFS and FAT32 perform very differently, especially when writing small files. In fact, as you’ll see in this review, the drive formatted in NTFS performs better in USB2 mode than when formatted in FAT32 in USB3 mode in some tests!

Eminent 8 Pot Gigabit Switch, published 26th January 2011 – Most people take network switches for granted just as they would with a power strip, but I’m sure some do wonder just what impact network switches have on network performance, such as throughput from one PC to another, ping time/latency and so on. In this review, I compare it against a direct network connection to show any deviation with an ideal network connection scenario, as well as a competing product, the D-Link Green Gigabit 8 Port Switch, the switch I currently use.

Front of the Eminent switch showing the LEDs

Rear of the Eminent switch showing the network connections.

Transcend 64GB SDXC card, published 30th December 2010 – This is one of the highest capacity SD cards available at the time of review, which Transcend was willing to give me a lend of for the review. In my review, I test it against the following other SD cards, including video footage, pictures per second at various sizes, handling of fragmentation and offloading performance. I also show the cons of judging an SDHC card by its class rating.

With my spare time now, I’m back into reviewing products. If you’re a manufacturer and would like me to carry out a review, please contact Sean at cdfreaks.com (at = @) and please do so before sending a review sample. These reviews are not biased, as I carry out reviews as a hobby and don’t accept payments apart from to cover any customs duty or the shipping cost of returning a faulty product. Due to the difficulty in arranging returns here, I give priority to review samples on permanent loan (i.e. don’t need to return after review).

Star rating warning: Due to a recent change in reviewing policy on MyCE, all reviews must have a star rating. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to accurately give a rating, especially since a rating to one person can mean something completely different to someone else. For example, I gave the Boombox a 4 star rating based on the features and performance for its retail value. However, someone who is critical about audio performance and quality would certainly have not given this such a rating, especially those that do not take the retail price into account. So the best way to get my impression on a product is to please read the conclusion’s positive and negative points and please ignore the star rating!